There’s more than one way of suppressing dissent… Spyblog, on the evisceration by spin of the Home Affairs Select Committee report on the surveillance society:
What actual use to the public, are Select Committees of the House of Commons, and the Reports which they publish ?
The Labour Government invariably cherry picks a quotation from the summary of such a Report, especially if it was written by a Labour Chairman of the Committee e.g. Government Response to the Home Affairs Committee: A Surveillance Society? (.pdf) leaped on the phrase ,
We reject crude characterisations of our society as a surveillance society in which all collection and means of collecting information about citizens are networked and centralised in the service of the state.
This allowed the Government to claim:
The Government welcomes the committee’s rejection of the characterisation that we live in a surveillance society where the state is engaged in a centralised network of collecting and analysing information on the individual.
Anyone actually reading though the detail of the Report, will see that it actually supports the premise that the UK is already a Surveillance Society.
